Thrilla in Vanilla
No, I can’t take credit for that headline. It’s the work of Bill Frost, a City Weekly staff writer whose writing always makes me laugh out loud. He gets all the credit.
Go here for Bill’s blog post on the silly, overhyped debate between Hannity and Anderson. It’s the best review I’ve read anywhere of last Friday’s event, and believe me, I read more criticism than than my gut could take.
A lot of you have posted on my previous blog entry about the Hannity-Anderson thing. I’m all but finished with writing/talking/thinking about it now, as the story is going on four days old and has just about grown fur at this point. I did, however, hear an amusing take on the whole drama while listening to KSL radio’s Doug Wright on the car radio this morning.
(My husband always asks why I listen to Wright’s talk show, and I always tell him it’s my best yardstick for measuring the way our garden-variety Utahn who marches in lockstep with authority thinks. For me, the show is a cultural magnifying glass. Today’s show did not disappoint.)
You’ll recall that KSL has been blowing every gasket since it learned the debate was a go. They went all wacky with promotion, including billing it as a “smackdown.” Those who watched it either live or on TV know it was anything but. Anyway, this morning Wright was doing his usual “woe unto us” hangdog analysis of our wretched, values-crossed society. The horribly insensitive audience, he said, was the real loser.
Wright simply couldn’t believe how rude, uncouth, how positively barbaric the crowd was. What with their heckling, interruptions and catcalls, why, the two narcissists on stage could barely get a word in edgewise. How, he asked, does an audience get off on behaving this way? What possible excuse could those people have?
Naturally it never dawned on Doug that his very own Sean Hannity has built a whole industry on interrupting callers he disagrees with, on name-calling and heckling and on pushing public discourse lower than an earthworm’s abdomen. You reap what you sow, Doug, and KSL has cultivated quite a garden of idiocy and social intolerance by choosing to syndicate Hannity year after year. Even though many of the outbursts came from pro-Rocky forces, we have a whole society that feels it’s perfectly fine to belittle others and cut them to their quick in a disagreement. I’d have to say both sides have learned the technique from the master: Hannity.
Hey, it’s always worked for him. So why not a crowd of heckling hayseeds at Kingsbury Hall as well?
May 7th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
I am always appalled by Hannity. I don’t “know” Rocky that well and they both had their agenda…but I found Hannity’s comments about “if you’re pregnant, it’s George Bush’s fault” really obscene.
May 8th, 2007 at 7:35 am
Way to let those m****r f***ing douchebags have it, Holly:-). Someone ought to tell Hannity to just shut his pie hole!
May 8th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Nice, gabespop–that was funny! I’m wondering, who came first–Sean Hannity or Jim Rome?
Even as someone who could be expected to agree often with Sean, I find him tiresome every time he’s talking with (at, really) anyone who disagrees with him. He’s an entertainer, not a deep thinking analyst. They really should have had him debate with Alec Baldwin or the Dixie Chicks, not Mayor Anderson.
But Holly, I think it’s a leap of logic to say that Hannity brought the toxic audience to Kingsbury Hall. My impression is that the people in the hall that were most abusive, interrupting, and hectoring, were the people least likely to have ever heard his radio show. And my impression is that college progressives are the most likely to take refuge in shoutdowns of speakers with differing views.
May 8th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Perhaps you’re right about this particular event and those who made most of the noise. I wasn’t there and watched on TV. But I think I’m close to something right about the culture of crudeness the political shock jocks like Hannity/Limbaugh/Imus have encouraged in this country. It works for them, so why not everyone else? I’m not thinking he actually brought the toxicity with him, more that he’s helped cultivate it and it showed up on its own because it’s become so acceptable.
May 8th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Yes. I also see this on many blogs (comment sections particularly), where anonymity frees up people to be more rude crude and toxic than they would be in person.
May 8th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Holly, I think you are right. It was acceptable to be toxic there and this current media environment supports it (I watched on TV too). I admit I was yelling, well sort of yelling, four letter words at Hannity when he talked. And does that make me better than him? Nope. I know Robert Kirby said the liberals were worse than Hannity supporters about heckling. And given he seems of a liberal bent (you would know the truth I’m sure) I would suspect he’s telling the truth. Lots of people should be appalled from all political bents.